Restoration Is Harder Than Hope

Randy Kennedy finds in the New York Times that the Met has a few more damaged works that aren’t getting repaired as quickly as was originally hoped:

In 2002 a 15th-century marble statue by the Venetian sculptor Tullio Lombardo — one of the most important High Renaissance statues in the museum’s collection — crashed to the floor and broke into hundreds of pieces when part of its dense plywood base buckled. Nearly six years later an Andrea della Robbia terra-cotta relief from the same period shattered after falling from a shelf above a doorway. Neither piece is back on view.

At the time of the mishap with the Tullio, curators and conservators said the sculpture, a representation of a lissome, youthful Adam, would be back on view within two years. But more than seven years later an immense conservation research project has grown up around the sculpture, pulling in scholars from Princeton and elsewhere and using digital technology that seems to have been borrowed from “Avatar.” But the marble is still probably three years from re-emerging, said Ian Wardropper, chairman of the Met’s department of European sculpture and decorative arts.

“This has taken much longer than anyone expected,” he said on Wednesday.